Out of the field

Alarming figures from the Department of Labour show a shortage of 220 000 farm workers on South Africa’s farms.

Traditionally, agriculture has been a huge employer of people in rural areas, but research by several land activist groups shows that more and more workers are being evicted from farms.

The Nkuzi Development Association, for instance, estimates that up to a million farm dwellers have been evicted from farms since 1994.

The farm-worker shortage, coupled with constant layoffs and evictions, seems a contradiction; but beneath the surface lie complicated politics and labour relations that have contributed to the current situation.

Farmers interviewed by the Mail & Guardian cited the minimum wage as one of the main reasons why they had to downscale their workforce. In other cases, where land is sold, new owners don’t want to employ the old workers. This often happens when labour-intensive farms that once produced food are converted into leisure-industry style game farms, requiring less — and different — staff.

Fish Motsapi (76), a retired railway contractor from Kroonstad, Free State, said small communities arose out of nowhere in the area because of farm workers who had lost their jobs. ‘Most of the farm workers in the Kroonstad area lost their jobs after land was taken over by new owners,” said Motsapi.

According to Motsapi most of the dismissed farm workers now live in Marabastad, an informal settlement in the area. ‘About three years ago hundreds of workers started squatting on empty stands in Marabastad. Most of them are unemployed,” he says.

‘Many new owners chased farm workers away because of the law set by the department of agriculture, stating that farm workers are entitled to a share in a farm if they work there five years or longer.”

In Limpopo thousands of farm workers have already lost their jobs on farms that have been claimed.

Trichardtsdal fruit farmer Michael Phasha says that four years ago there would have been about 400 permanent workers on a farm of 7 000ha. Today there are just 47. Seasonal workers are hired instead.

‘Nearly all farm workers lose their jobs when a farm is taken over by a new owner,” says Theo de Jager. One reason for this, he says, is the frustratingly slow pace of the handover from old owner to new, which can take two years. ‘Production comes to a standstill during this time. The government creates further delays by taking ages to give new farm owners the start-up money they were promised. Farm workers lose their jobs because production simply stops,” he says.

De Jager cites conflict between new farm owners and existing farm workers as another reason why workers lose their jobs.

‘In most cases the workers are not part of the claimant communities that now own the farm. Tension is created between the workers, who have the knowledge and skills to farm, and the new farmers, who still need to learn these skills. In these cases farm workers often choose to leave, or are told to do so.”

Louis Malahlela, who has been farm manager for Ferris McGaffin, a timber and tea farmer in Tzaneen for 13 years, says that farm workers are often left out of land claims.

‘No one on the committee (the communal property association that lodges land claims on behalf of a community) sits down and talks to us about what is going to happen and whether we’ll still have jobs once the land is taken over,” said Malahlela. ‘The tea factory closed down after land was claimed and many farm workers lost their jobs.”

Bittersweet

Jacob Mngoma, a sugar-cane farmer in the Waterbosch area near KwaDukuza, is becoming increasingly despondent about farming: ‘My land is under claim [for three years] by two different groups. I’m still waiting to get news. In the mean time all my young cane is getting eaten by the cows owned by people from the tribal authority.”

Mngoma, who has been working his farm for more than five years, bemoaned the lack of intervention by government to equip black farmers with skills and resources: ‘I’ve had no training or support from government, I’ve come in here cold and had to find my way myself — with help from other farmers in the area.”

Arjun Jagessur, secretary of the Darnall Farmers’ Association, says spiralling input costs is also sounding the death knell for small-scale sugar farmers who usually work land of between one and 20ha: ‘A lot of the indentured Indian labourers bought smallholdings after saving up for years, but now these small farms can’t survive because of the rising cost of petrol, chemicals and fertiliser. There was a time — until the early 1980s — when these people were able to survive and still put their children through university.”

Jagessur says the output from smallholdings in the area has decreased from about 120 000 tons a year in the 1980s to half that now.